Comment by soulofmischief | Hacker News Reader

Comment by soulofmischief | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the premise and have also learned to apply my engineering habits to other domains that I normally struggle with. It helps a lot and allows me to churn through projects that previously would have not seemed tractable.

But in this article, the TLDR and first paragraph have textbook LLMisms. The landing page for the book is clearly vibecoded both in structure and copy. This is very alarming for material that is meant to market a book, which I expect to not be vibe-written.

So whose book is this, actually? What otherwise could be a very useful lesson comes off as a trojan horse for automated viral marketing slop in order to promote a book which I have to assume at this point is vibe-written. To be clear, I use AI heavily in my work today, and understand the difference between AI-assisted work and vibe-coded work. This appears to fall in the latter camp. How much editorial control did you assert over this project? Where did the ideas come from? How do I know a given snippet is a well-researched fact or the product of experience, instead of an unfounded potential-hallucination?

I've also been making websites for decades, Ben, and most people I know in that camp are more interested in letting their hard-earned experience elevate their output to the top of the pile in an increasingly competitive space.

If this is the direction we're going in, vibe-coded marketing campaigns and vibe-coded landing pages for books that we rationally have to assume are also vibe-coded and basically a medium for Claude, then we as authors must adopt an atmosphere of clarity and transparency towards our audience. A book like this needs more information about the process so that people like me don't immediately and rationally disregard it as slop. I can see your blog goes back to 2011 so I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and a chance to explain yourself further.

Fair. The project originally started as "turn my blog into a book", with a 1:1 mapping of blog post to chapter. I got feedback early on that that wasn't landing, but if you compare the outline on the book site to my blog archive, the original posts are still there.

Chapters built on an earlier post making the same argument:

- Why everything should have a URL → "Why URLs?" (2015) + "Expose process through URLs" (2014)

- Speak like a human → "Write corporate blog posts as a human" (2015)

- Optimize for developer happiness → "On stickers and optimizing for happiness" (2015)

- The zen of open and async work → "The zen of GitHub" (2015)

- Lead like an engineer → "Manage like an engineer" (2023)

- Rethinking management for remote teams → "Deprecate management" (2012) + "Cathedral–bazaar management" (2023)

- Retool your documents → "Word vs. Markdown" (2014) + "We've been trained to make paper" (2012)

- The etiquette of issues and pull requests → "Types of pull requests" (2015) + "Pull requests are a form of documentation" (2023)

- Showing colleagues they're valued → "Three easy ways to show employees you appreciate them" (2017)

- Choosing the right collaboration tools → "Tools of the trade" (2020)

- What I wish I knew before going remote → "Eight things I wish I knew my first week at GitHub" (2016)

- Career conversations → "The brag doc" (2026)

- Intro to software development for non-technical roles → "GitHub for non-technical roles" (2023)

And chapters that are near-verbatim descendants of a named post:

- Leaders show their work → "Leaders show their work" (2022)

- Work loudly → "Work loudly" (2026)

- Meetings are a point of escalation → "Meetings are a point of escalation" (2023)

- The Andon principle for knowledge work → "Transparency & collaboration is the Andon of knowledge production" (2023)

- Engaging with dissent → "Dissenting voices" (2024)

- How to 1:1 → "One-on-one playbook" (2026)

- Agentic workflows → "Agentic workflows" (2026)

- Why you should work asynchronously → "Why async" (2022)

Interesting, I'm curious how much you think lessons and practices from say, 2012 or 2014 are holding up so far in a rapidly changing post-AI environment. That would be my next concern as a potential buyer.

I think as a proof-of-concept that a book and its marketing campaign can be executed from start to finish with a programmatic, automated approach, it's an interesting piece. It seems to be listed on multiple outlets, I'm curious how much that part of the process was able to be handled by agents vs being done manually. I would almost be more interested in a book about this process than the actual book.

And I do recommend applying a much stronger human-in-the-loop editing process to any material meant to market this book (and of course the book itself). Prior experience and taste are all we have left in this new era.

> I'm curious how much you think lessons and practices from say, 2012 or 2014 are holding up so far in a rapidly changing post-AI environment.

I didn't touch too much on AI in the book itself (since it's changing so quickly), but it was interesting to reflect that the fundamentals of 2012/2014 (Markdown, URLs, APIs, etc.) carry double the weight when we start thinking about machine readability.

> It seems to be listed on multiple outlets, I'm curious how much that part of the process was able to be handled by agents vs being done manually.

Entirely manual, and I suspect that's by design. I've never published a book before, so I did ask (non-agentic) AI questions about the process (should I use service X or service Y, should I do a pre-sale, etc.).

> And I do recommend applying a much stronger human-in-the-loop editing process to any material meant to market this book (and of course the book itself).

100% human in the loop. I wanted the public-facing presence to be reader-centric, not marketing/author centric, which I felt was the norm LLMs are trained on.

> Prior experience and taste are all we have left in this new era.

+100. I held the book to a much higher standard than I do musing I randomly post on the internet that hardly anyone reads. (I didn't expect this to get so much attention). I'm going to take another pass at both the post and the site tonight. Thanks for the feedback.

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